Hierarchies of sustainability in a catchment

Abstract

This paper investigates notions of sustainability in a catchment area represented by a multidimensional spatial data set. Predictive catchment Land Use, Cover and Change (LUCC) models simulate the environmental and economic effects of land use over time. These predictions can be used to form a data cube of aggregated data tables, where the aggregation measures indicate issues of sustainability across different data dimensions and at different levels of summarization. As well as a global (or catchment-wide) concept of sustainability, measures of sustainability can be provided by region, farmer, land use, and other data dimensions. A hierarchy of sustainability is apparent when data dimensions are hierarchical.